How I built this

Ben Tossell published an account of rebuilding his personal website using AI coding agents, describing a process that began with an agent-app concept and ended with a simpler design deployed at bentossell.com.

His first idea was a site styled like an agent app, with each thread holding different information such as details about him, his investments and products he likes. He gave Codex an image of the Ben's Bites app and asked it to build a prototype. The first pass had threads on the left, a chat interface in the middle, suggested prompts and a second sidebar on the right.

His AGENTS.md instructs the agent to create three design versions to flick through, which in this case were mostly themes. He annotated screenshots in tldraw and sent them back to Codex with short instructions, repeating that loop several times. He wrote that he thinks Claude models are better at inferring intent from design work, while GPT is more rigid and needs more specific feedback for tweaks. He also tried a design-review skill made by designer Emil Kowalski, noting he generally disables model-invoked skills and only invokes them himself.

Content was moved into individual Markdown files. He used here.now to deploy, disclosing he is an investor in the company. He ran a design review focused on animation, made a to-do file grouping ideas by complexity, and had Codex use another agent, Droid, to run some work with Grok because he was not getting what he wanted from GPT models on the interface. By about 10pm the site had grown a long list of possible features, including an animated version of his dog Nero.

He slept on it and disliked the result, calling it too complicated for a personal site, and scrapped it. He then returned to an earlier canvas-like idea, made a mock-up with handwritten notes and small previews, and referenced a personal site by Daniel White that used a file-tree structure as a timeline. After more annotated screenshot iterations, he removed the old agent-interface files and unused dog animation frames.

He deployed the simpler version to bentossell.com, with the domain managed through Vercel; he said the domain change took about 20 minutes to settle. He added a drawn mascot that waddles across the top, keyboard controls (up arrow to jump, left and right for faster movement), a hover tooltip, the mascot as favicon, and Rough Notation for animated underlines, boxes, circles, highlights and brackets. He later added light and dark themes, then removed the toggle and let the site follow the visitor's system setting. He ended by writing that the agent-interface concept is something he loves but will save for another build.